Gloverly Cupcakes

Making a gingerbread house has become an annual event with my friend Anne. Each year we seem to spend more time talking and drinking tea and less time making and decorating our gingerbread! It’s great fun and hopefully we’ll be doing it for many more years to come. This year I decided to make a bird box and keep the colours simple with just white Royal icing with a few red highlights. Click

My husband has recently cut gluten out of his diet as he has discovered it really helps his asthma. So I used the usually gingerbread recipe which can be found here and used Doves Farm plain gluten free flour and it seemed to work. It didn’t hold its shape as well as usual, but it seems solid enough and hasn’t crumbled – yet!

I used thin cardboard to make a template, luckily the shape was very simple. I decorated all the pieces using royal icing and let the go completely hard before assembling. Emma and I went on 2 professional cake decorating courses at Squires International Cake School over the summer, so it was great to use some of the Royal icing techniques we had learnt.

Once the house was set in place, I piped some details on the edges where the sides had been joined together, to hide the joins. I then piped a straight line around the edge of the board let that dry and flooded it with royal icing.

Once this had dried I piped more detail around the edge of the board and added some small red dots. For the join on the top of the roof, I used a roll of sugarpaste to fill in the large gap and then piped some extra details. On a piece of paper I drew the outline of a heart, some circles and a bird and its wing. I placed this on a board and lay a sheet of Perspex over the top. I rubbed a very smal amount of Trex over it to help me remove the piped shapes once they wer dry. I used a number 1 piping nozzle to pipe the outline of each shape and once dry I flooded the shape and left it to dry out before careful removing them from the Perspex using a small paler knife. These were then secured in place using more Royal icing.